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Nvidia's RTX 5090 power connectors are melting

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Re: Nvidia's RTX 5090 power connectors are melting

#441

Post by fooker »

KeplerBoy wrote: post #271
fooker wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you measured latency? In modern(last 4 years approximately) GPUs, physical wiring distance is starting to contribute substantially to latency.

latency due to wiring distances is far from being an issue in these scenarios. The signals travel at the speed of light. 186 miles per millisecond. The problem you will encounter with pcie gen5 risers is signal integrity.

> The signals travel at the speed of light

It's about 75-90% the speed of light, but even that's too slow.

Modern hardware components are getting to latencies in single digit nanoseconds. Light travels about 30cms in a nanosecond, so extending a pcie port to a different box is going to have a measurable difference.

Re: Nvidia's RTX 5090 power connectors are melting

#442

Post by fooker »

dylan604 wrote: post #250
fooker wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you measured latency? In modern(last 4 years approximately) GPUs, physical wiring distance is starting to contribute substantially to latency.

There were no latency concerns. These were video rigs, not realtime shoot'em ups. They were compute devices running color correction and other filters type of thing, not pushing a video signal to a monitor 60fps 240Hz refresh nonsense. These did real work /s

Ah makes sense, the other kind of graphics!

Re: Nvidia's RTX 5090 power connectors are melting

#443

Post by ChrisRR »

shawnz wrote: post #364
MBCook wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe having cards drawing >500/600 watts is just a bad idea. Add in a CPU and such and we’re quickly approaching the maximum amount of power that can be drawn from a standard 12 amp circuit continuously.

What's the proposal here, just convince everyone to stop demanding more powerful hardware?

Seems like the Pentium 4 issue. Realise that your current approach isn't sustainable long term and change your approach

Re: Nvidia's RTX 5090 power connectors are melting

#444

Post by ChrisRR »

bongodongobob wrote: post #374
shawnz wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the proposal here, just convince everyone to stop demanding more powerful hardware?

Idk but if computers are drawing enough power to melt themselves just to play ray traced Minecraft or write boilerplate Python code, perhaps we've gone wrong somewhere.

> write boilerplate Python code

This is my biggest issue. I'm still impressed that we need GHz and GBs to run simple apps that were achievable with MHz and MBs 20+ years ago

Re: Nvidia's RTX 5090 power connectors are melting

#445

Post by vvv5 »

dcrazy wrote: post #141
vvv5 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That connector (C13) is rated for 15 amps. That's 180W at 12V.

I’m not sure what you’re trying to suggest here… the PSU is also connected to the wall with a C13 connector, and is able to supply 600W at 12VDC to the card.

Yes, but the voltage on the wall side of the psu is not 12V it's 120-240V. And 600W at 120V requires only 5A of current. It's easier to handle more power at higher voltages because heat produced depends on current and not on voltage. If you take that puny C13 connector and move it to the 12V side with its 50A it would just melt.

Re: Nvidia's RTX 5090 power connectors are melting

#446

Post by hoseja »

BigJono wrote: post #13

This shit is so fucking dumb. Sorry for the unhinged rant, but it's ridiculous how bad every single connector involved with building a PC is in 2025. I'm just a software guy, so maybe some hardware engineer can chime in (and I'd love to find out exactly what I'm missing and why it might be harder than it seems), but why on earth can everything not just be easily accessible and click nicely into place? I'm paying mult…

Electrical engineers are extremely proud when they can enshittify a $1000 article by replacing a ¢15 component with a ten times worse ¢12 component.

Re: Nvidia's RTX 5090 power connectors are melting

#447

Post by Modified3019 »

Henchman21 wrote: post #170
ImHereToVote wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Nobody will pay $3 for a connector" I would pay $10.

This whole conversation seems absurd! Of course you'd pay for the right power connector for your multi-thousand dollar card! You don't buy a $200k sports car and then take it to Jiffy Lube for oil changes. You pony up for the cost of proper maintenance!

A quote I found the other day and saved (forgot where from):

>Like the classic trope says, it's not about affording to buy the Ferrari, it's whether you can afford to maintain it.

Re: Nvidia's RTX 5090 power connectors are melting

#448

Post by immibis »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #292
immibis wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are already huge conversion blocks outside the PSU. That's why they figured there's no need to keep an extra one inside the PSU and run more wiring everywhere. Your CPU steps down 12 volts to 1 volt and a bit. So does your GPU. If you see the big bank of coils next to your CPU on your motherboard, maybe with a heatsink on top, probably on the opposite side from your RAM, that's the section where the voltage get…

Those are actually at the point of use and unavoidable. I mean extra ones that convert to 5V and then send the power back out elsewhere. All those drives and USB ports still need 5V and the best place to make it is the PSU.

Why is the PSU the best place to make 5 volts? In the distant past it made sense because it allowed some circuitry to be shared between all the different voltages. Now that is not a concern.

Re: Nvidia's RTX 5090 power connectors are melting

#449

Post by ants_a »

MBCook wrote: post #398
shawnz wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the proposal here, just convince everyone to stop demanding more powerful hardware?

Stop and try again? Either you’re not going to get a choice, or you’ll need a 240v three phase outlet installed and possibly an expanded electrical panel. Nvidia has been all about “as fast as possible, no compromise” for a very long time now. So was Intel, until the Pentium 4 forced a big reset. At a certain point this stuff is just totally untenable. Throw more amps at it stops being workable. Apple seems to be abl…

Consumers already have the choice of not buying the most powerful card.

Increasing die size to run cores in a more power efficient regime is not going to work, because a) the chips are already as big as can be made, and b) competition will still push companies to run the 250 cores uber fast and figure out some way to push enough power to it.

As long as there is customer demand for this, these things will get built. Given the amount of bad press these melted connectors create, possibly with better engineered power delivery systems.

Re: Nvidia's RTX 5090 power connectors are melting

#450

Post by mschuster91 »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #369
mschuster91 wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If only we had connectors which could actually handle such currents. The problem isn't connectors, the problem (fundamentally) is to share electric connectivity between multiple conductors. Sure, you can run 16A over 1.5 mm² wires, and 32A over 2.5 mm² (taken from [1], yes it's for 230V but that doesn't matter, the current is important not the voltage). And theoretically you could run 32A over 2x 1.5 mm² (you'd end…

> The correct solution would be for the GPU to not tie together the incoming individual 12VHPWR pins on a single plane right at the connector input but to use MOSFETs and current/voltage sense to detect stuff like different current availability (at least it used to be the case with older GPUs that there were multiple ways to supply them with power and only, say, one of two connectors on the GPU being used) or overcur…

> It's not hard

It still is because in the end you're dealing with dozens of amps on the "high" voltage side and hundreds of amps on the "low" (GPU chip) voltage side. The slightest fuck-up can and will have disastrous consequences.

GPUs these days are on the edge of physics when it comes to supplying them with power.

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